Ambition Anywhere Printer

17th November 2014

Online50 provide a Universal Printer license to users for a low one off cost that provides access to Universal Printing software.  This software is designed to ensure that users can print from Online50 services with no issues.  Over the years we have used different Universal Printing solutions, and none of them have really delivered what we want.  It is quite amazing how difficult it has been to find an appropriate solution — as the following story shows.  One vendor sent a salesman to see us.  As we had stated in advance that we would have technical questions he assured us he was the Technical Director and gave us business cards saying that he was.  (The company's website still showed he was a salesman though!)  He could not properly answer any technical questions.  He did not understand that we provide services to a large number of small businesses, and so we don't want a solution that assumes that everybody accessing the system works for the same organisation.  He did not know either how his solution worked, or why it had been designed with certain limitations.  That company is still going and is surprisingly popular.  As you might expect for a company that sends salesmen out to visit prospects their solution is certainly not cheap.

After continuous frustration we will be releasing our own solution imminently.

We already provide our PDF writer to Online50 users that have subscribed to the Universal Printer license.  This is being extended to talk to a print spooler that can run on a user's computer.  The user configures the print spooler to associate a named queue with a particular printer and set of print settings.  The PDF writer then allows the user to deliver the created PDF documents directly to the queue.  The next release will allow users to publish print queues to other authorised users so that users in different locations, or away from the office, can print to the published print queues.

Users of our PDF writer will have noticed that it typically prints much faster (some user report four times faster) than using a standard universal print driver.  And because print drivers are used extensively when working with documents destined for print this allows Sage reporting to benefit from the same speed increase.  As we will use the PDF writer for users wanting to print to the Anywhere Printer spooler on their local machine working with Sage reports and printing will be significantly faster for Online50 users.

The spooler can run on both Windows and Mac computers (although we may delay the release of the Mac spooler).  The PDF writer runs in a user's Online50 session allowing Online50 users accessing services from their tablet devices to print to printers connected to their PCs or Macs.

The Ambition Anywhere Printer will be made available to all Online50 users that have a Universal Printer license.